Jane Porter
Jane Porter is an author.
More than forty-five titles, twelve million books in print, twenty languages: the numbers describe a career built in two distinct modes, and the credits on this page almost all show the first one.
The early work is category romance in its most concentrated form. This is Harlequin Presents, where the titles are the marketing, the settings are moneyed and international, and the contract with the reader is a fantasy delivered efficiently inside a short book. Porter was good at the compression that requires. There is no room for a subplot in a Presents novel, so the entire weight falls on the central pair and on how fast a writer can make an obstacle feel real.
The second mode is what she is better known for now. Her women's fiction moves into ordinary contemporary lives, divorce, work, friendship and starting over in middle age, and one of those books, Flirting with Forty, became a Lifetime film starring Heather Locklear. In 2014 she won a Romance Writers of America RITA Award for Best Romance Novella, for Take Me, Cowboy. Neither title is among the credits listed here, so this page shows the apprenticeship rather than the destination, which is worth knowing before judging her by these covers.
Books (8)
Where to start with Jane Porter
If you have arrived from the women's fiction, be warned: the books listed here are almost entirely category romance and they follow that genre's rules rather than hers.
Taken on their own terms, The Italian Groom and Christos's Promise are the early Presents novels at their tidiest and the fairest test of whether the mode works for you at all. The Greek's Royal Mistress and The Sheikh's Virgin sit at the high-fantasy end of the same shelf, titles that announce exactly what they are selling, and there is no point pretending otherwise.
Hollywood Husband, Contract Wife is the most fun of the set, because the setup gives her something to satirise while she delivers it. The genuine outlier is Easy on the eyes, contemporary women's fiction about a television news anchor and the closest thing here to the writer Porter became. Start with that one if the category titles put you off.